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Aid groups say regulations on food aid in the U.S. Farm Bill protect special interests at the expense of the world's hungry
By Megan Rowling
As U.S. Senate hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill get underway, aid groups are calling for Washington to get more bang for its food aid bucks - especially amid today's tight fiscal climate and high food prices.
Food aid from the United States accounts for about half of the world's total. But what's wrong with it?
Quite a lot, say non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Under the longstanding system of "tied" food aid, large amounts of cereals, pulses and vegetable oil are purchased from big American corporations - around 40 percent of it from just three firms.
The food is transported overseas on U.S.-flagged ships, accounting for 60 percent of the aid's total cost and taking from three to six months to arrive.
Even after reaching its destination, it's not all handed out to hungry people. A chunk of the food is sold by aid agencies on local markets, generating cash to fund their development programmes on the ground in a process called "monetisation".
"It's just craziness," says Paul O'Brien, vice-president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America.
Aid groups argue that regulations on the food aid programme in the Farm Bill, legislation which oversees U.S. food policy, protect special interests - mainly large agricultural corporations - at the expense of the world's hungry, and mean that more than a third of every dollar the United States spends on food aid goes to waste.
"In this very difficult budget environment, it is absolutely critical that we don't waste money, and not least because the world is so far off meeting targets on reducing hunger," says O'Brien.
Citing the prospect of a rapidly developing food emergency in border areas of Sudan and South Sudan, where clashes have displaced more than 400,000 people, "there's just no way we could respond effectively if we wanted to ship food from the United States," he adds.
An analysis of a $60-million pilot project to buy U.S. food aid in the countries and regions where it's needed showed that, on average, local purchases were at least 60 percent - 14 weeks - faster than shipments from the United States. And for cereals and some pulses, cost savings amounted to 50 percent or more, although little or nothing was saved on processed products and some varieties of beans.
Timi Gerson, director of advocacy at American Jewish World Service, says NGOs want to see this test project at the very least maintained, but ideally expanded and allocated regular funding in the Farm Bill.
They also want as much food aid cash as possible to be "untied", so it can be used to fund more effective and innovative ways of tackling hunger, including cash transfers and vouchers for people to buy their own supplies, local procurement, and strengthening sustainable agriculture.
"Our food aid dollars should be flexible enough so that we can choose the best way of delivery," says Gerson.
Other desirable reforms include an end to the practice of monetisation - which floods developing-country markets with imported U.S. food - and the preference for using U.S.-flagged ships, says Oxfam's O'Brien.
"In this tough economic climate, we do need to think about U.S. interests, but the business case (for the current food aid model) doesn't hold," he argues.
TACKLING MALNUTRITION
Asma Lateef, director of the Bread for the World Institute, says the U.S. administration should also aim to target food aid at meeting key nutritional goals, especially for pregnant women and children under the age of two.
Widespread recognition of the long-term ramifications of inadequate food in the first 1,000 days of a child's existence has pushed Washington to focus on nutrition as part of new agricultural development and health initiatives.
"At a minimum, we should begin to include goals on nutrition as a measure of the impact of U.S. food aid," says Lateef. "It's really important to have a discussion on how food aid can be better aligned with broader development goals."
Later this week, a coalition of aid groups plan to send a letter to Capitol Hill requesting an additional hearing on the international implications of the Farm Bill, including food aid. Some 80 percent of the annual $2 billion or so spent on food aid by the U.S. falls inside the bill's remit.
But how likely is it that efforts to reform food aid will be successful? If past attempts are anything to go by, perhaps not very.
A push by the Bush administration, launched in 2005, to persuade Congress to let U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) purchase a quarter of food aid locally failed, for example.
In 2012, O'Brien admits there is a "significant risk" that the pilot project on local procurement will be dropped from the Farm Bill altogether due to resistance among the agricultural lobby, let alone made part of core funding.
But if Congress does dig in its heels on tied food aid, it will be rowing against the international tide, which is shifting towards cash-based aid and buying from producers in developing countries.
"The whole aid-effectiveness world has converged around the idea that we want local leadership up and running, and anything that stops that is problematic," O'Brien says. "The practice of importing (food) aid is an anachronism that is increasingly unpopular for all global donors."
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